The CIA just invested in a hot startup that makes sense of big data

In
this March 3, 2005 file photo, a workman slides a dustmop over
the floor at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in
Langley, Va.Associated Press/J. Scott
Applewhite

The CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel just signed a
strategic investment and technology development agreement with
ZoomData, a Virginia-based startup that can quickly turn a bunch
of data into a meaningful visual dashboard.

ZoomData uses something called Data Sharpening technology
to deliver visual analytics from real-time or
historical data. Instead of a user searching through an Excel
file or creating a pivot table, ZoomData puts what's important
into a custom dashboard so users can see what they need
to know immediately.

In-Q-Tel
didn't talk much about how the CIA might use the technology,
though it says that any investments it makes are for
things it can use within 36 months. Perhaps,
a potential use case could be a dashboard to look at the
many different raw intelligence reports coming in to spot trends,
or to look at data from social media postings to
predict potential global hotspots.

"There are many startups in this space and we’ve seen pretty much
all of them," Steve Bowsher, IQT managing director,
told Forbes. "None of them had the scope of what Zoomdata’s
trying to do."

IQT did not say how much it invested, though it typically funds
startups in the $1 to $3 million range. The ZoomData investment
comes just seven months after the company
closed a $25 million Series C round led by Goldman
Sachs. It's raised nearly $50 million since launching in 2012.

The CIA-backed fund has made a number of investments into
enterprise software in recent years.

One of its most high-profile investments is in the
secretive data-mining startup
Palantir. In April,
it secretly gave money to Mesosphere and Docker,
cutting-edge tech companies that help to easily run software
in data centers and to build and manage software at larger scale
in the cloud, respectively.

"We’ve seen tremendous interest in Zoomdata in the federal
sector," Justin Langseth, CEO of Zoomdata, said in a statement.
"The investment and strategic development agreement with IQT will
make it much easier for [intelligence agencies] to test,
develop, and deploy solutions that leverage our unique big data
visual analytics capabilities in the cloud without individual
contracts that have to be negotiated every time."